Jeffery: welcome to the supporters fund ask an investor. I’m your host, Jeffery Potvin and let’s please welcome Nick Cavuoto as our investor today. Welcome Nick. It’s a real pleasure.
Nick: Thank you so much. appreciate you having me.
Jeffery: very excited to have you on today. there’s been, I would say, of probably all the people I’ve had the opportunity to speak with, you have a lot of content online. I don’t know if I was able to watch everything. but man, you’ve got a lot of great stuff and that’s very exciting for anybody that gets the opportunity to chat with you or interview you. they’re always going to be looking for a lot of great content so they can have a lot of backups. So, I’m super excited to be able to review that. So, the way we like to start the show off is that we’d like to learn a little bit more about ourselves. So, maybe you can share a little bit about your background all the way back from Circuit City School, all the great things that you’ve done to get yourself to where you are today, and then one thing about you that nobody would know.
Nick: awesome. Well, I’ll start by saying, my first real world job, I was 17 and started working at Circuit City. and for those of you who don’t know what Circuit City is, then that means you’re younger than me, and I’m 34. So, it’s a pretty cool spot, think of Best Buy, a very similar big box store around electronics. and I’ll tell you the interesting thing about me that most people don’t know because it’s in the context of that story. but I was the number three sales person in the whole company working part-time as a teenager. Basically, I was less than 20 years old and most people don’t know that. but I’ve been in OG and SALS for a long time and I’ve always been very revenue minded but very intentional on the heart basis of what I choose to do and how I choose to do it. So, I started at Circuit City, went from there and had a pretty cool job in college. I worked at the Breakers Hotel in South Florida, learned the hospitality industry which was pretty epic. I had a choice of working there at Mar-a-Lago and chose work at the Breakers. And yeah it was fascinating when they hosted the Ferrari convention of the world there. I met a lot of really powerful people and that was such a neat experience. I went on to go into vocational ministry where I started as an intern executive assistant and then ended up actually being number two in the organization and built the church from a thousand to ten thousand people every weekend with multi-site locations that were international. We had six different locations and that was certainly the first feather in the cap if you will as far as success goes and in business because when you’re running a eight figure budget at 25, you’re running a business. we’re not talking about a couple of 10, 20, 30 or 100 people showing up on a weekend. we’re talking about event marketing and managing huge buzz budgets inviting other public speakers. It was a really cool experience. I had a lot of fun doing that and then from there, I went into the startup world and I worked for my first startup which was called Six Month Smiles. they’re still around to this day doing really cool things. They were the primary technology competitor to Invisalign for essentially creating straight teeth with a less than noticeable look. So, help that company grow by implementing essentially HubSpot as a marketing platform, a sales and marketing platform and I did it with a hundred grand grew, the company by five million in nine months and that’s when I knew that I both had the competence and the confidence to go out into the business world and do something to make a splash. So, post my first startup, I went into fortune 500. I managed a billion dollars’ worth of products at paychecks, managed three different lines of business that were all rolling up into their primary suite of human capital management as a software product and basically got bored in 11 months. I took 300 performing teams, and doubled their revenue and said I’m out of here too. I got sniped from a HubSpot executive who remembered me from the days of Six Months Miles. They invited me into an incubator in Boston and the company basically as of today. Part of the acquisition process was picking up our company but I spent a lot of time in Boston in the startup community there and then built my own agency. I built three different companies. I should have exited on a few of them but I chose to hang on and those are part of the entrepreneur lessons. I was in my late 20s, early 30s and learning really valuable lessons and now I spend most of my time working with high performers. So, we’re talking celebrities, public figures, speakers, inspirational leaders and I’m a bit of a maverick behind the scenes helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be and it’s a ton of fun. I have so much fun doing it. So, I believe that people are the world’s most powerful brands and that’s where a lot of my investment opportunities come from.
Jeffery: amazing really. I think that you’ve done quite a few things for the short amount of time or we could say the long amount of time from your Circuit City days to today. if we go back to the Circuit City time and it’s interesting that in all of the roles that you have, you have a defining figure that defines who you are in that role. meaning you took a hundred thousand, made into five million. you took the top three sales people, you were part-time. So, there’s always one metric that defines the role each time that you go through it. What do you think is defining from that time that you started? Is it your hunger and drive for success? Is it your way of breaking through the monotony of what’s being done and finding ways to be clever, more innovative, smarter, faster, quicker to sell? What do you think has really been the feature that defines you in each, not every role, but overall? I say the encompassing thing because when you take those metrics, they are sales driven. they are getting yourself out there, that you’re not afraid of anybody. you’re not afraid to talk to someone, stop them in their tracks and sell them something. What is that piece that really defines each one of those roles that helped you succeed from Circuit City forward?
Nick: human behavior. I’m really good at sales and marketing because I really understand people and why they do what they do and what their fundamental reasons are on why they’re doing it. My brother worked with me at Circuit City, my oldest brother. So, there’s a bit of the youngest in the family, the oldest in the family. little competition there. and he used to get really pissed because he’d be like man, I’m telling everybody about the TVs and all the different specs and what they can do in contrast ratios and you’re like out on Saint Patrick’s Day with your buddy across the street like drinking Long Islands and you come back and close 25,000 worth of deals. I said it’s very simple. I ask them two questions. number one. in the process of bringing you here, like what are you looking to achieve? like basically what’s your goal? what do you want? and be like, well my wife, she loves watching movies and so. like that’s primarily okay. Cool. So, movies or sports? Which one’s more important? Movies are great. Then, you’re going to go with the Sony XBR. and I immediately put them into that product fit based on their needs and desires or their wants and I can just cut that path really quick because I’m great at building rapport with people. and it happens mostly from the visual concepts and or some of the early conversation pieces. I’m not talking to them about contrast ratios. I’m talking to them about imagining what that feeling will be like when all their friends come to their house for the big game and that’s what sells people. It’s an emotion. so, being an illuminator on emotion and not a manipulator on emotion but I’m allowing them. Basically, I suffocate their BS of all the reasons why they can’t do it and I overcome their objections with emotion and essentially with clarity. So, those are the things. but it’s all in human behavior. I’m great at marketing. It sounds great because I understand psychology.
Jeffery: and I think this is brilliant. So, when you’re working with that person, when they initially come to you, how are you getting them? because there’s that. Well, if you don’t buy it today, you’re going to miss out. The price is going to go up. there’s that high pressure sales tactic which everybody thinks they need to use. sounds like you’re approaching this in a less formal way but almost becoming their mentor or their coach on getting the best product by making them feel comfortable enough. in an instance, by learning more of what they want, letting them do the talking. So, you’re spending more time listening while feeding and pulling that information out and then going to call it for the kill. but going in for that end close which is hey man, you’ve given me enough information over the last five minutes of you drooling over this TV that I set you up in front. I’m going to close with you now. Is that a fair analogy on how you’ve worked this process?
Nick: totally. it came out of the foundational understanding that I knew that whoever was showing up spent way more time researching these TVs on amazon or on some industry consumer products site. educators are buyers. They are educated now more than ever so they are already coming in with a preconceived idea. So, what I learned was to pinpoint that distinction. Samsung wanted to be known for having this the best sports television. Sony wanted to be known for having the best television for an experience, which happened to be better in the film sector rather than in the sports sector. So, the technology that went into the TVs was basically I was offering them the same information and the same approach as consumer reports. So, I understood th